From Publishers Weekly
Fourth in a popular series about a Southern widow with perfect manners and a taste for trouble, Ross's latest will bring a chorus of "Thank you, Lord"s from faithful readers. Newcomers may need a moment to figure out who's who in the cast-for instance, that Little Lloyd is the son of Julia's late husband, Wesley Lloyd Springer, and his "paramour," Hazel Marie, both of whom Julia has embraced as family. Ross's heroine may set a premium on appearances, like any traditional Southern lady, but what she really loves is problem solving and gracefully doing good. This time out, she finds herself championing her longtime housekeeper, Lillian. A greedy landowner is about to raze Lillian's home-in fact, the entire Willow Lane neighborhood, which houses low-income blacks. In order to save them, Julia gambles her own home and flouts her sense of propriety by donning Hazel Marie's leather pants and participating in a high-stakes motorcycle marathon and poker game, along with the Presbyterian minister's previously stodgy wife. And if that sounds improbable, factor in a spring whose water has an awesome effect on garden shrubbery and men's anatomy, furnishing oodles of delicious scandal. Series fans take note: Binkie and Coleman have a baby, and things look mighty promising between Julia and lawyer Sam Murdoch at the end of the book.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Just a few months after the incidents described in Miss Julia Throws a Wedding [BKL My 15 02], the proper seventysomething widow is up to her neck again in other people's business. This time, housekeeper Lillian and her neighbors are about to lose their homes to a developer who wants to tear down the old houses and put up a water-bottling plant. Miss Julia won't have it, and she starts to look for ways to buy up the land herself. But there are other worries. Hazel Marie, who decamped with Little Lloyd to try a live-in arrangement with J. D. Pickens, has moved back to Miss Julia's after a few too many encounters with J. D.'s ex-wives. Unsavory old Lester Thurlow seems to have something more than fund-raising in mind. And what has come over Sam, who shows up one day wearing leather and riding a Harley? Despite Miss Julia's misgivings, Sam's motorcycle ends up being pivotal to the success of her schemes. Her many fans will lap it up. Mary Ellen Quinn
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